Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Liu Shu Fu/Office of the President/Flickr/CC BY 4.0
IN A RECENT interview, President Lai Ching-te raised eyebrows with a claim that US president Donald Trump would “surely win the Nobel Peace Prize” if he were able to convince Chinese President Xi Jinping to renounce the use of force against Taiwan. The claim was made during an interview with US radio host Buck Sexton of “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.”
“The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” is considered a spiritual successor to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show before Limbaugh’s death in 2021. As such, the show’s far-right leanings suggest that the Lai administration was intending a message to be conveyed to Trump and MAGA Republicans. Lai may be trying to correct for the perception that Taiwan has lost the MAGA Republicans, as reflected in a controversial Substack article by former US State Department advisor Christian Whiton. According to Lai’s Facebook post about the interview, the meeting was arranged by Stephen Yates.
Trump has been rather public about his desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize. It is generally thought that Trump would hope to cement his aspirations to win the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of ending some global conflict, such as the war in Ukraine or the conflict in Gaza. When asked if he would nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that he believed the Ukrainian people would gladly nominate Trump if he ended the war. On the other hand, despite being the leader of a country conducting an ongoing genocide against Palestinians backed by the US, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times.
So, too, then, with Lai. Just as Netanyahu presumably seeks to maintain US support for Israel by baiting Trump with a potential Nobel Peace Prize nomination, Lai would be seeking to flatter Trump and appeal to his ego by suggesting that Trump could potentially win the Nobel Peace Prize through ending tensions in the Taiwan Strait. This is probably why Lai chose a MAGA-aligned outlet to make this statement, rather than trumpeting it in a more respected international outlet, given the potential optics of otherwise suggesting that Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is unclear to what extent this would genuinely appeal to Trump. Trump has vacillated between animus against Taiwan, with accusations that Taiwan stole the US semiconductor industry and does not do enough for its own defense to warrant US support, as well as times in which he has praised US-Taiwan ties. Given that Trump can at times become unpredictably amiable with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Taiwan has long been cautious of the possibility of Trump seeking to trade off Taiwan as part of trade negotiations with China.
Attempts to placate Trump have included Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing giant TSMC announcing a 100 billion USD investment in the US. This substantially increases the scale of investments that were already record-setting with regard to TSMC’s Arizona fab. Taiwan has also pledged to increase its defense spending to 5% by 2030, even though Trump’s demands that Taiwan increase its defense budget have shifted from 5% to 10%. These amounts would be challenging to reach, given that defense spending already accounts for one-third of all government spending at 2.5% of GDP.
Still, for a numbers-averse leader such as Trump, it is ultimately the optics of submission that may make a deeper impression than investment or defense spending figures. This may be what Lai has hit on.
It is important to note that during Lai’s comments, Lai expressed a desire to meet with Trump to discuss issues regarding the Taiwan Strait. This is not the first time that Lai has expressed such a desire, with Lai previously having caused consternation in DC earlier on in his administration over comments that he hoped to visit the White House to meet with Trump. Although such comments were made by Lai out of an aspiration to expand Taiwan’s international space, this was read by some in DC as indicating Lai’s desire to rock the boat when it came to cross-strait relations as part of pro-independence aspirations. Clearly, Lai still wishes to meet with Trump, with reports that travel to Latin American allies of Taiwan was canceled after the US did not allow for a stopover by Lai. Even at a time of great uncertainty about the future of US-Taiwan ties, the US is still of paramount importance for the Lai administration.
Still, the tide of “US-skepticism” is unlikely to be stemmed in consideration of the unpredictability of the Trump administration’s actions, and this is a political phenomenon in Taiwan that Lai must himself answer to. Lai cannot lean too much into uncritical sycophancy toward Trump either, or he would pay for this domestically. It is already the case that TSMC’s Arizona fab has been criticized by the pan-Blue camp as potentially compromising Taiwan’s “Silicon Shield” and increasing defense expenditure as risking Chinese retaliation. Lai will have to navigate the challenge of convincing the Taiwanese public that he is not compromising on Taiwan’s fundamental sovereignty with Trump while also placating the mercurial US leader.